The more information we find about the upcoming video game The Last of Us, the more excited PS3 fans are becoming. It's only been about two months since Naughty Dog's upcoming title was revealed at the Spike Video Game Awards, and while not every gamer is talking about the new property quite yet, it's coming with incredibly high expectations after Uncharted 3 had a strong presence during awards season. Unexpectedly, as impressive as The Last of Us looks, Naughty Dog almost made a Jak and Daxter 4 in lieu of this newfound original I.P..

Game Informer recently had a chance to interview Naughty Dog Co-President Evan Wells where it was confirmed that the developer almost began development on a new Jak and Daxter game. The idea to bring back the series was eventually dropped in favor of applying everything that Naughty Dog had learned from the Uncharted series into a new intellectual property that would later go on to become The Last of Us.

"We’d all talked about it in interviews with fans asking, 'Where’s the next Jak & Daxter?' I don't know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively.

Something that we talked about early on was, 'Lets go back and apply what we’ve learned with the Uncharted games to Jak & Daxter.' It’s one of the franchises that’s near and dear to us, and, in all honesty, we'd like to somehow honor."

Mr. Wells did elaborate on why the game didn't come to fruition, much to the dismay of Jak and Daxter fans, stating that the company felt like they would be doing fans of the series a "disservice" if they were to alter the game to the "direction that the company had this passion for." Those hoping for a return to the classic Jak and Daxter formula may have been in for a surprising turn of events if the game had been green lit, however, as Wells mentioned that Jack and Daxter 4 would have been more of a reboot than a follow-up.

"Even if we felt like we’re going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted. We would end up limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realised we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point, the conversations started to move in a new direction."

The co-president of Naughty Dog did encourage fans not to lose faith at the chance of seeing the popular PS2 duo return, claiming that they should "never say never" when it comes to the stagnant property.

"It could happen. Naughty Dog’s got a long history and I think it’s got a long future so to say we’ll never go back is kind of crazy but right now we’ve got [The Last of Us] that we’re definitely going to be supporting. I guess there’s a possibility that the Uncharted team could move on to Jak and Daxter. It’s still up in the air, but I wouldn’t think that’s going to happen, because I think we’d run into all of the same problems with that team that we did with this team.”

Those looking for a J&D fix actually have the Jak and Daxter Collection releasing for the PlayStation 3 on February 7th. While it's not the sequel fans have been waiting for, it'll likely ease the pain for a little while longer.

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Source: Game Informer